Continuing the monthly summaries of what I’ve been reading and writing. (This one’s a bit overdue!)

BOOKS

To keep my numbers consistent with what I have listed on Goodreads, I count completed magazine issues and stand-alone short stories in e-book format as “books.” I read or listened to 7 books in July: 2 in print, 5 in e-book format, and 0 in audio. They were:

1. Lightspeed Magazine #110 (July 2019 issue), edited by John Joseph Adams. The usual fine assortment of sf and fantasy short stories. This month’s favorites for me were Andrew Penn Romine’s “Miles and Miles and Miles,” Indrapramit Das’s “The Moon Is Not a Battlefield,” J. Anderson Coats’ “Mother Carey’s Table,” and Senaa Ahmad’s “Ahura Yazda, The Great Extraordinary.”

2. Ormeshadowby Priya Sharma. You would think that as an English major in college, I’d have read something, anything, by Willa Cather. But if I did, I don’t recall it at all (please forgive me, Professor Malcolm Marsden!). So I’m counting this as my first Cather work. I’d like to read more by her eventually. I found this one an interesting character study. Full Review HERE.

3. Sealedby Naomi Booth. An interesting combination of near-future environmental horror, graphic body horror, and a potentially unreliable narrator. Not for the easily squeamish, for sure. Full review appeared at Strange Horizons on August 30th. http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/sealed-by-naomi-booth/

4. Treasure Trail, by Morgan Brice. This is the first M/M urban fantasy/paranormal romance by Gail Z. Martin’s pen name that I have read, and it won’t be the last. This, the first in a new series, takes place in very haunted Cape May, NJ and introduces us to an antique shop owner with “the touch” (the ability to sense an object’s supernatural history) and a former cop turned rental property manager who sees ghosts. There’s also present- and past-day Mafia connections, because NJ.

5. A Secret Guide to Fighting Elder Gods edited by Jennifer Brozek. A really fun anthology of Lovecraftian Young Adult stories. The stories hit all the requisite Lovecraft themes and monsters, but with settings mostly in the present day focusing on teens – and often, on teens seeing what the adults can’t or won’t see.

6. The Trans Space Octopus Congregationby Bogi Takács. Bogi’s newest short story collection, due out from Lethe Press in October, has a wonderful mix of science fiction and fantasy, including a few stories set in a shared future setting. Eir stories touch on many present day issues, including the immigrant, transgender, and “alternate sexuality” experiences. A great read.

7. The Triumph of the Spider-Monkeyby Joyce Carol Oates. Not going to lie, this was a very difficult read for me. Long out of print and brought back by Hard Case Crime, this is a very disturbing look inside the head of a serial killer.

STORIES

I have a goal of reading 365 short stories (1 per day, essentially, although it doesn’t always work out that way) each year. Here’s what I read this month and where you can find them if you’re interested in reading them too. If no source is noted, the story is from the same magazine or book as the story(ies) that precede(s) it:

Monthly Special Challenge: I may not do something like this every month. Having checked several different websites, it seems like July is not a month that lends itself to any specific reading goal (it’s the National Month of several foods, though: National Baked Bean Month, Culinary Arts Month, Grilling Month, Horseradish Month, Hot Dog Month, Ice Cream Month, Blueberries Month, and Picnic Month!) So my mini-challenge to myself was to make July Series Month, to help me catch up on one of my year-long challenges (The “Complete the Series” Challenge).

Friends, I completely bombed this self-challenge. I brought two series on a three-week business trip (Seanan McGuire’s Velveteen series, and one of the two remaining books I need to read in Chinua Achebe’s Africa Trilogy) and read precisely none of them. (In fact, I discovered on the trip that I’d brought the wrong Achebe with me, so stopped reading….)

August’s monthly special challenge is/was in honor of PulpFest and FarmerCon, the annual overlapping conventions that celebrate the fiction of the Pulp magazine era and the work of author Philip Jose Farmer. Tune into my next post to see how I did with that!

Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.

Today I’d like to talk about three very different stories from the Parvus Press anthology If This Goes On: The Science Fiction Future of Today’s Politics, edited by Cat Rambo. I intend to read this whole anthology eventually, but figured I’d take a random sampling just to get me started.

“Green Glass: A Love Story” by E. Lily Yu. This one starts out as a classic SF love story: a man literally sends a probe to the moon to get a birthday/engagement present for his fiancée. But Yu does remarkable things with the story progression from there, revealing both the past and present (and a glimpse at the future) of the theoretically-happy couple. Yu gives us a future where the world has been largely despoiled and the working class are increasingly sicker because of it while the rich just get richer and healthier; everything this couple does to prepare for their wedding is expensive and wasteful just to make an impression. But there’s also the undercurrent that some things may never change: in an age of pre-nups that even designate how many children a couple will have, the woman still gets taken advantage of, gaslit and blindsided. I started out thinking the main characters were a bit unlikeable, grew to despise them for their excesses, and then actually felt a little sorry for the main female character by the story’s end. I think Yu manages to show us that while short fiction usually focuses on one aspect of a dystopian (or utopian, or whatever) society, the reality is that no facet of a society exists on its own and ignoring the bigger picture for the details that benefit you the most will almost always backfire.

“The Last Adventure of Jack Laff: The Dayveil Gambit” transcribed by Steven Barnes. It’s no secret that I love noir in all its forms – hard crime to SF. So it was probably a guarantee I’d love this story by one of the pioneers of Afrofuturism. The voice of the narrator/title character is gruff, macho, take-no-prisoners, and yet Barnes also imbues him with more honor and a bit less misogyny than the classic 40s-50s originals of this type. Still, a trope of noir is that the hero gets suckered, at least for a little while, by a beautiful client while ignoring his faithful and loving secretary … and Barnes leans into the trope with skill and subtlety, subverting it by staying true to it almost all the way through the story. All the classic types are here: the femme fatale, the hard-pressed secretary, the questionable businessman, and the links to an earlier case that turn out to be more important than the narrator at first realizes. Culturally, Barnes shows us a future where movements like #MeToo result in every business and personal interaction being filmed by bodycams and the footage securely stored in case of future litigation. The story takes several twists that I don’t want to spoil here.

“The Harvest King (Will Surely Come) by Nisi Shawl. One of the many things that impresses me about Nisi Shawl is her world-building when it comes to alternate (her novel Everfair) or future histories, and the voices she uses to reveal that world-building to the reader. Here, we get the religio-fascist future of a portion of the former United States called “Heartland” shown to us through two very different, equally sycophantic voices. The first voice is that of an American “king,” who has inherited his place from his the previous ruler (who ruled for twenty-one years), and who is now making plans to pass that throne on to the husband of his daughter (whose name happens to be Tiffany) … because in this future even the hereditary throne can’t possibly go to a woman. I’m not sure just how far in the future this part of the story is set. At first, I thought it was very near-future (a daughter/granddaughter named Tiffany), but the other voice Shawl uses – the pages of a Bible section called “Letters to the Oligarchs” makes me think that our present is a dim memory to the “king” who is about to leave his throne. The characters, all unlikeable, refer to slaves and “mud people,” and to ritual sacrifice of living “effigies” to appease the earth and guarantee a good harvest. Shawl wonderfully co-mingles pagan rituals (writ large via monster trucks and harvesters) with the racial purity ethics of a subset of our current population to posit a future where America has turned from democracy to theocracy.

Continuing the monthly summaries of what I’ve been reading and writing.

BOOKS

To keep my numbers consistent with what I have listed on Goodreads, I count completed magazine issues and stand-alone short stories in e-book format as “books.” I read or listened to 11 books in May: 4 in print, 2 in e-book format, and 5 in audio. They were:

2. Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather. You would think that as an English major in college, I’d have read something, anything, by Willa Cather. But if I did, I don’t recall it at all (please forgive me, Professor Malcolm Marsden!). So I’m counting this as my first Cather work. I’d like to read more by her eventually. I found this one an interesting character study. Full Review HERE.

3. The History of Soul 2065 by Barbara Krasnoff. I’d previously read only three of the twenty short stories that comprise this mosaic novel that covers fifteen decades in the lives of two families. Subtle magic, strong women, strong LGB representation, strong ties to the Jewish Diaspora.

4. Spinning Around A Sun: Stories, by Everett Maroon. Flash fiction with sometimes horrific twists, these early stories by Maroon show hints of the style he works so well in his novel.

5. Fresh Kill (Jimmy McSwain Files, Book 6) by Adam Carpenter. Jimmy McSwain is back for another round of mysteries, and Carpenter returns to the character and his New York City setting with style. Full Review HERE.

6. Lumberjanes Volume 11: Time After Crime by Shannon Watters, Kat Leyh, and others. The latest Lumberjanes collection gets a bit timey-whimey, but in a very different way from Doctor Who. I was happy to see the focus this time is largely on Molly, with lots of character growth stemming out of her stressful family interactions.

7. Shout Out edited by Andrew Wheeler. This is a wonderful YA graphic novel anthology of short stories featuring pretty much the entire range of LGBTQIA+ characters across genres from science fiction and fantasy to romance (and often intermingling several genres at once). I can’t praise this one enough.

8. Synchronicity by Keira Andrews. I am notoriously under-read when it comes to gay romance (as opposed to gay sf/fantasy/horror with romance or erotica elements). For some reason, much of the gay romance I have read falls into the sports romance realm, and this short about a synchronized diving team at the Olympics is no exception. Nicely written with likeable characters.

9. From A Whisper to A Riot: The Gay Writers Who Crafted An American Literary Tradition by Adam W. Burgess. I’ve really not been doing well on the whole “read more non-fiction” thing, largely because I read non-fiction much slower than I read fiction. This work by Adam Burgess is a nicely-detailed look at a critically under-represented period in gay fiction, and it is worth your time seeking out. My full review is HERE.

10. The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan, narrated by Suzy Jackson. A first-person narration ghost story high on eeriness but not gore, featuring a narrator who is lesbian and “crazy” (by her own words). I love narrators who tell you right at the start that they are not necessarily reliable, and IMP is one of those narrators. This is a really great listen. Suzy Jackson captures the main character’s innocence and slow fraying as she goes off her meds while relating her tale.

STORIES

I have a goal of reading 365 short stories (1 per day, essentially, although it doesn’t always work out that way) each year. Here’s what I did read and where you can find them if you’re interested in reading them too (with some short notes for stories that really stood out to me). If no source is noted, the story is from the same magazine or book as the story(ies) that precede(s) it:

1. “Between The Dark and the Dark” by Deji Bryce Olukotun, from Lightspeed Magazine #109 (June 2019 issue), edited by John Joseph Adams.

Monthly Special Challenge: I may not do something like this every month, but I set a June goal to try to read primarily work by Queer authors or centering Queer characters, since June was Pride Month.

I think I was pretty successful with this one. I’m unsure how many of the writers in the June issue of Lightspeed Magazine identify somewhere on the Queer spectrum. But Will Cather was a lesbian, Everett Maroon and Caitlin R. Kiernan are transgender, and Adam Carpenter and Adam W. Burgess are gay. Many of the creators of the Lumberjanes series and most, if not all, of the creators of the stories in the Shout Out graphic novel anthology are Queer-identifying as well. And while Barbara Krasnoff is straight, The History of Soul 2065 heavily centers two queer couples with a third couple mentioned.

Having checked several different websites, it seems like July is not a month that lends itself to any specific reading goal (it’s the National Month of several foods, though: National Baked Bean Month, Culinary Arts Month, Grilling Month, Horseradish Month, Hot Dog Month, Ice Cream Month, Blueberries Month, and Picnic Month!) So my mini-challenge to myself is going to be making July Series Month, to help me catch up on one of my year-long challenges (The “Complete The Series” Challenge).

Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.

Every now and then, these posts end up being a mish-mash of recent reads that have no obvious connection. This is one of those posts.

“The Good Girl” by Lucy V. Snyder (from her collection Soft Apocalypses but also June’s selection on the author’s Patreon). This is not the first time I’ve read “The Good Girl,” and it probably won’t be the last. But I have to say that between readings, I’d sort of forgotten just how wonderfully sly Snyder is at easing the supernatural aspect into a story whose premise is already horrific: a young woman having to return home to the father who abused her and the mother who let it happen, for one last chance at a goodbye to a sister she’d abandoned to her fate. There are so many directions the story could go on that description alone, and Snyder keeps you guessing as to exactly which direction she’s leading you in. The narrator struggles with her own guilt and her own justifications on the drive to the family homestead; the characterization is deep and nuanced, the narrator unsure of whether she qualifies as the “good girl” of the title either now or in the past. There’s also a delightful secondary character who provides a little light humor in an otherwise dark story, because we all need a good chuckle before the final scare.

“Freak Corner” by John Rolfe Gardiner (from One Story #254, June 20 2019). Abuse, or at least neglect, of a different kind confronts the narrator of this story. It is 1953, and while the narrator’s small town neighborhood is in an uproar about how Alfie Kipps is now Margaret Kipps, the narrator has a more immediate concern: his deaf sister’s education. The story shines a light on just how recently American Sign Language was considered a fake language, a cheat for deaf people to avoid learning to speak properly, at the same time that transgender issues were just starting to come to the public conscious thanks to Christine Jorgensen. It also shines a light on how far we have, and haven’t come: ASL is a recognized language after a long-fought battle; transgender people are still ridiculed, shamed, and threatened just for existing. Gardiner’s story is less about trans-acceptance than it is about ASL-acceptance, but the narrator’s sister, Gayle, is bolstered by the support of this other social outcast even while her brother falters between supporting her and toeing the parentally-set line of “speak, don’t sign.” There’s also an undercurrent of “false nostalgia,” the narrator saying, without saying, that “the good old days” weren’t so good for a lot of people.

The Story of O-Tei by Lafcadio Hearn (from Oriental Ghost Stories, Wordsworth Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural edition). I’ve been trying (with varying success) to read at least one short story by an author on their birthday, mixing authors I’ve long loved with those I’ve never read. This is the first Lafcadio Hearn story I think I’ve ever read, despite owning both the Wordsworth Edition paperback collection sampling stories from Hearn’s several books as well as the hardcover compendium the Library of America recently issued. I maybe should have chosen a longer story to sample, but even this short simple tale I think captures Hearn’s tone. In “The Story of O-Tei,” the titular woman is betrothed to a man she really wants to marry but she falls ill before the wedding can be performed. She promises him that if he waits, she’ll return to him. He asks for a sign, and she says it’s not in her power to give, but he’ll know her. In the hands of a more modern author, the misfortunes that befall the man when he marries another woman under family pressure would probably be the focal point of the story; Hearn glosses over them except to show that they are not really road-blocks to the fated reunion. Is that reunion happy or horrific? I won’t spoil that for the potential reader. But I loved the way Hearn tells the story: not full of the heavy detail of his Victorian peers, but full of heart and acceptance that the supernatural is part of life.

TITLE: From A Whisper to A Riot: The Gay Writers Who Crafted an American Literary Tradition

AUTHOR: Adam W. Burgess

226 pages, Kindle Direct, ISBN 9781797500072 (paperback, e-book)

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): For many decades, the two dominant areas of study for gay literature in America have centered on the periods of Stonewall Riots and the AIDS crisis. These examinations are critical and understandably exhaustive; however, the abundance of attention paid to studies within them further explains why less attention has been given to literature published before these momentous events. The truth is, the gay literary tradition in America is much longer and richer than we have acknowledged.

In this extensively-researched academic text, queer studies scholar Adam W. Burgess, Ph.D., examines the genesis of the gay literary tradition in the United States, which developed between 1903-1968. Burgess employs close literary analysis of critical but lesser known texts alongside sociocultural and historical perspectives in order to explain how and why gay authors managed to write and published in a time that was openly hostile to homosexuality and homosexual themes.

From A Whisper to A Riot contributes a critical missing component to the study of gay literature in the United States. It covers a range of authors, from Charles Warren Stoddard and Henry Blake Fuller to James Baldwin and Mart Crowley. The book is a must-read for academics, students, and scholars of American literature, history, and LGBT Studies.

MY RATING: Four out of Five stars

MY THOUGHTS: Adam Burgess’ From A Whisper to A Riot is a well-reasoned argument for the development of a deeper body of criticism and analysis of American gay fiction, and especially that work by known gay authors, that comes after Oscar Wilde but pre-dates Stonewall.

This is not an exhaustive index of every pre-Stonewall novel published in America that centers gay characters. That type of work would be valuable as well, but Burgess here is more concerned with the dearth of critical writing about such works: what might, without too much hyperbole, be considered the erasure of several decades worth of works which can be either uncomfortable reads (due to societal attitudes), inscrutable (due to the need to express homosexual aspects in carefully “coded” language to avoid censorship laws), or both. Using a relatively small selection of novels and one play, all originally published between 1903 and 1968, Burgess proposes an easily-followable methodology for such criticism. As such, Burgess’ first (and hopefully not last) exploration of the topic is not a breezy overview; he does some heavy lifting in dissecting works such as Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Imre: A Memorandum, Forman Brown’s Better Angel, Charles Warren Stoddard’s For The Pleasure of His Company, and Henry Blake Fuller’s Bertram Cope’s Year. Burgess also explores the popular-at-the-time Gay Pulp Novel genre and the harm it did in perpetuating the stereotype of gay men as perverted and effeminate and often suicidal. This is not an easy aspect of the gay American literary tradition to explore, bringing as it does so many triggering topics to the fore. Burgess handles them with delicacy and academic remove.

Burgess divides his analysis into four topics: how character displacement (for instance, sending an American character overseas to explore his sexuality) eased skittish readers into accepting the narrative; how the pulps perpetuated harmful stereotypes as opposed to the novels that preceded and followed the genre; how coding was used to signal a character’s homosexuality and actions in order to subvert obscenity laws; and how the novels handle the intersectionality of gender and sexuality. I think each section could probably be a more detailed book on its own, allowing for an even more detailed and nuanced analysis of the concerns brought up. I found the “coding” and “pulp” chapters to be more interesting than the “displacement” and “intersectionality” chapters, but your mileage may vary. Either way, I think the reader is likely to come away, as I have, with a lengthy list of previously-unfamiliar (to me) books to add to the To Be Read list.

Burgess does also acknowledge that some American gay fiction of the period has already been subject to deeper critical analysis (works by Truman Capote, James Baldwin and Gore Vidal for instance). He doesn’t ignore it, but also doesn’t re-hash it.

Tracking the movement of gay-centered (and more broadly, queer-centered) fiction from “the love that dare not speak its name” (a whisper) to “society-changing” (a riot) is not the easiest of tasks, but Burgess makes an excellent start with this volume.

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads) Jimmy McSwain returns, but the question remains, now that he has finally solved the fifteen-year-old murder of his father, NYPD cop Joseph, who is he now? Busy concentrating on family issues, Jimmy hasn’t taken a new case in nearly three months, and when a call comes in from Philip Connelly, who wants proof of his wife, Myra’s, cheating, Jimmy is torn. Take the case, or so no. He rejects it, only to learn a week later that Philip has been found dead in a park on Staten Island. The police believe it was suicide, but Myra—a self-admitted adulteress—is convinced he was murdered. Guilt eating at him, Jimmy agrees to take the case. But it seems his decision to rejoin the world has also affected the other areas of his life: his sister Mallory is healing from the bullet meant for Jimmy, an old friend from his father’s past has resurfaced, and his lover, Captain Francis X. Frisano, is working a difficult case in Chelsea where gay men are being attacked. If that wasn’t enough, Jimmy is on the hunt for his new nemesis, the criminal mastermind Mr. Wu-Tin, who months ago tried to murder him. A fire at one Mr. Wu-Tin’s warehouses stirs fear in Jimmy that the man is trying to destroy evidence of his crimes. As he works the case of the cuckolded husband, a surprise twist happens in his pursuit of Mr. Wu-Tin. Suddenly Jimmy feels that just as he is hoping to find answers, new questions emerge about what it means to get a fresh start on life.

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

MY THOUGHTS: Fresh Kill launches a new sequence of Jimmy McSwain Files from author Adam Carpenter. Any time a series that seems to already be complete takes a pause and then returns, there’s always the concern that the author may be dipping too many times into the same tapped-out well. Will the new books just be repetitive of what went before? Will we see the same types of cases, the same types of suspects, the same-old-same-old romance/sex?

I’m happy to report that Adam Carpenter has managed to keep things fresh with his re-launch of the Jimmy McSwain Files. Yes, there are some similarities in terms of narrative arc and character development, but overall this doesn’t feel like a re-tread. If this were a television series (and hopefully someday it will be), this book would be that season that gets added when the network says “your show makes us a lot of money, find a way to continue it.” Unfortunately, on television such decisions rarely result in a new season of equal or better quality (I’m looking at you, Castle!). Thankfully, in the print world the creator/author has a bit more control over what’s done to extend the story.

The action picks up just a few months after the end of Forever Haunt, the final book in the first sequence. For those who might not remember, that book ended with good news/bad news. Jimmy finally solved the murder of his beloved father, but a new enemy tried to kill Jimmy and almost succeeded in killing his sister Mallory instead. Jimmy’s been taking time off from the private investigating to help with Mallory’s physical therapy (and, honestly, to blame himself for her predicament and vow vengeance on the man who ordered the botched hit). So this sequence gives Jimmy a new family-related crime to obsess over: finding the evidence he needs to help the police arrest and convict international businessmen/crime lord Mr. Wu-Tin. This is similar to the arc of the first five books, in which Jimmy was obsessed with solving the death of his own father in front of his eyes fourteen years earlier. The difference this time is that Jimmy knows exactly who ordered the hit on him – he just can’t prove it because the evidence he has on Mr. Wu-Tin is inadmissible in court. And so the NYC Police, with whom Jimmy has always had a tenuous relationship as an organization, can’t do anything. Jimmy is frustrated with their inaction and with being told to stay away from the suspect while the wheels of justice slowly turn.

But now that Mallory is being transferred to a care facility “up-state” (Putnam County, which really is only considered “upstate NY” if you’re from NYC or Long Island, but I digress), Jimmy needs to start working again. Investigating, and aggravating, Mr. Wu-Tin is not going to pay the bills. Jimmy gets a call from, and turns down, a potential client who wants him to investigate infidelity claims. A week later, the caller turns up dead on Staten Island. The police say it was suicide, but the victim’s wife wants Jimmy to prove it was murder. Complicating matters is the wife’s actual infidelity with not one but two men (one she calls her lover, the other her boyfriend), and employees of the dead man with secrets of their own. It’s a fairly straightforward murder mystery as these things go, although if I have any complaint about the book it’s that there weren’t enough actual suspects to consider. Most of the peripheral characters are cleared pretty quickly and written off (so to speak). I think I’d have liked a little more mystery to the mystery; instead, the reader picks up pretty quick on what’s really going on – quicker than Jimmy does, at least – and more time is spent linking the main case to Jimmy’s obsession. I won’t spoil all the twists that get us there, as there are some fun reveals along the way.

There are also three subplots running, that will continue through the remaining books in this sequence, I’m sure.

First, there’s Mallory’s recovery, set against the fact that the rest of the women in the family have the summer off (the theater at which Jimmy’s mother and younger sister work closes for the summer) which leaves Jimmy as superfluous at best. There are several solid scenes between Jimmy and his family members, including his Uncle Paddy, and I always love seeing these interactions. This is a family that loves each other but never pretends any one of them is perfect, and the relationships feel real.

The second sub-plot has Jimmy developing a new mentor relationship – Ralphie, his father’s best friend and former police partner died in Forever Haunt and Jimmy’s feeling at loose ends for a mentor. Enter Jonathan Tolliver, another former co-worker of Jimmy’s dad, now retired thanks to ALS. Jonathan fills the hole quite well, providing advice and insider info from his time on the force. Unfortunately, it’s pretty obvious that Jonathan, like Jimmy’s previous mentor, likely won’t survive the end of this sequence.

And the third sub-plot is, of course, Jimmy’s relationship with Captain Francis X. Frisano of the New York City Police. It took a long time, and lots of near-misses, for Jimmy and Frank to become comfortable with their relationship and how public it is or isn’t. Since the Jimmy McSwain Files are romance as much as mystery, Carpenter almost has to play into the tradition of throwing roadblocks in the lovers’ way. The roadblocks here start early, with discussions of career paths and public displays of affection, and build throughout the book mostly thanks to Frank’s precinct needing to investigate a robbery-turned-murder of a gay couple (clarification: only one of the couple dies). This is a rough book for “Friswain” fans, for sure. (I’m not sure if I just created a ‘ship name…) Oh, and it probably behooves me to mention, there’s lots of well-described sex between the two. Just in case anyone new to the series doesn’t know about the explicit sex already.

In addition to the strong presence of Jimmy’s family and new mentor, I was happy to see the Frisano/gaybashing storyline allowed Carpenter to bring back another fun supporting character in Terry Cloth, owner and drag-queen host of The Dress-Up Club. It’s not easy for Carpenter to work the Dress-Up Club into the narrative if there isn’t a case involving the club, but it works pretty organically here. In fact, I’d love a non-mystery novel from Carpenter set in the Dress-Up Club.

The main mystery comes to a head and co-mingles with both Jimmy’s obsession and his romantic life in the book’s closing pages – without spoilers I can say there’s a pretty serious series of gut-punches for our hero that make me think the next book or two in the series are going to be very different from the six we’ve seen so far. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it gives the author a chance to break away from any sort of formula and hopefully gives the main character a chance to grow even more.

Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.

This month I read what I think is my first Willa Cather work. If we read anything by her in high school or college, I don’t remember it. I know, I know. As an English Lit major, how have I never read O Pioneers! Or My Antonia? I need to rectify that one of these days.

In the meantime, one of this month’s arrivals from the Melville House Art of the Novella series is Cather’s novella Alexander’s Bridge. The book is a strong character study. Bridge architect Alexander, his wife Winifred, his ex-girlfriend and eventual mistress Hilda Burgoyne are all well-drawn and multi-dimensional, their friend Professor Wilson perhaps a bit less so. They are all recognizable as people we might know, although I can’t say any of them are particularly likeable; I never felt like I could be friends with any of them in real life, or anything more than an acquaintance. This is not necessarily a bad thing; characters who are not completely likeable can be more interesting to read about. It’s not that any of them are despicable or evil. They’re ordinary people going about their lives, making the good, bad, and questionable decisions we all make.

The plot is a pretty straight-forward depiction of the development of an affair. Although we’re never explicitly shown it, Alexander seems to have been a bit of a wild child in his youth, but eventually he met Winifred, and as he settled into happy married life, his professional career also took off. A trip to London re-introduces him to an ex-girlfriend turned noted young actress. As they become reacquainted, their passion re-ignites. Over multiple trips between the US and London, Alexander vacillates between commitment to one woman and the other, each representing some part of his personality … parts he cannot easily assimilate. Keeping secrets from his wife, trying to distance himself from Hilda -- Alexander’s slowly deteriorating security in his own self-image ends up reflected in the slow crumbling of his professional career as more and more of his projects, including a major one in Canada, hit snag after snag. It’s all neatly balanced, and the end is, if not predictable at least not completely unexpected. The question for the reader ultimately becomes: which will destroy Alexander first? Will it be the revelation of / the guilt of his affair? Or will it be the collapse of his grand bridge project?

One part of the story that I’m not sure completely worked for me was the Professor. He comes to visit Alexander and Winifred at several key moments, including the very start of the book. Cather makes much of how taken with Winifred the Professor is, how much he enjoys spending time with her – but this narrative thread never plays out into anything that affects the story as a whole. Winifred seems flattered by the Professor’s attentions, the attraction mutual, but nothing is ever explicitly stated or acted upon. It felt as if it went nowhere for all the emphasis placed on it in the early pages. I’d have liked to have seen the attraction addressed, even if it was a simple “Winifred was flattered, but loved her husband too much” type of statement.

I have to say that I enjoyed the character work enough to be glad I read the novella, even though I don’t feel like it was anything cutting edge in terms of story.

Series Saturday is a series about … well, series. I do so love stories that continue across volumes, in whatever form: linked short stories, novels, novellas, television, movies. I’ve already got a list of series I’ve recently read, re-read, watched, or re-watched that I plan to blog about. I might even, down the line, open myself up to letting other people suggest titles I should read/watch and then comment on.

Jordan L. Hawk is a non-binary, queer and very prolific writer of M/M supernatural romance series, including the Whyborne & Griffin books (Lovecraftian in tone, and coming to a conclusion later this year), Hexworld (alternate history NYC where magic, and shape-shifters, abound), SPECTR (modern-day vampires and ghosts), and the Spirits trilogy, which is what I’d like to talk about today.

The Spirits books (Restless Spirits, Dangerous Spirits and Guardian Spirits) take place in a slightly-alternate history America at the turn of the previous century, wherein everyone knows spirits, and thus hauntings, are real. Some spirits are friendly, or at least essentially harmless, but some can and will cause great harm. As can, and do, people who pretend to be talented mediums but who are really just fakers.

Enter Henry Strauss, a scientist who was misled and taken advantage of by a fraudulent medium when he was younger. Henry’s goal is to reduce the odds of people being taken advantage of by using scientific means to locate, attract, and ultimately remove the threat of, ghosts. His Electro-Séance does the trick, if he can get it to work correctly and convince people like the Psychical Society of Baltimore that it’s more reliable and effective than human mediums. Henry, and his assistant/cousin Jo, get their chance when they are invited by a wealthy industrialist to a de-haunt a house in upstate New York – in competition with a renowned medium, Vincent Night, and his partner Lizzie. The industrialist is pitting science against spiritualism, but Henry and Vincent feel an immediate attraction to each other. Complications (and a little bit of hilarity and sexual shenanigans) ensue.

The “science versus spiritualism” competition is really only a part of the plot of the first book, and the rest of the trilogy finds Henry and Vincent working together on cases that appear to be distinct but in fact lead to revelations about Vincent and Lizzie’s pasts and a threat to the whole world.

There are certain things one expects from a Jordan L. Hawk historical series:

· Two engaging, but quite insecure in different ways, male leads (and chapters that alternate point of view between the two)

· A slow-burn romance in the first book, but insecurity-driven misunderstandings even once they do get together

· Steamy sex featuring those male leads, multiple times per book, although the number of scenes per book usually decreases the longer the series goes on

· A diverse supporting cast

· A well-developed world with internal logic to how the supernatural element works and consistency in whether the general public knows about/believes in the supernatural or not

· High stakes (often life-or-death) for the characters, but also for the world or society they live in.

But here’s the thing: Hawk’s books don’t feel formulaic even with all of these consistent elements. And each series, thanks to that intricate world-building and thanks to the variety of lead characters, feels different from the others.

The Spirits trilogy maintains its focus on ghosts/spirits, and eschews any other form of the supernatural. No werewolves, vampires, zombies, witches, or cosmic horrors. Just spirits and the people with the ability/talent to communicate with and affect them. Vincent Night is a medium (he can speak to spirits and spirits can speak/act through him). Lizzie Devereaux is a spirit-writer. Other supporting characters are sensitive in one way or another. And then there’s Henry, who wants to do what Vincent does through science, specifically electromagnetism, instead of spiritualism. But there’s nary a hint of other magic in the books at all, and that’s refreshing. (Even though I’ve joked with the author on social media about a story where Henry and Vincent meet my favorite Hawk characters, Whyborne and Griffin, it’s clear that these series are set in the same time-period but very different versions of “our world.”) This trilogy is an ongoing debate on science versus spirituality (or, if you’d like, science versus religion/belief), but the author at no point allows one to best the other. There’s a trend out there right now in fantasy novels for magic to work the way science does – rigid rules of use and conduct and cause-and-effect – and Hawk refreshingly doesn’t use science to explain the spiritual nor use the spiritual to justify the science.

As with many of Hawk’s romantic pairs, Henry and Vincent are a study in contrasts. Henry is literal in his approach, not prone to expressions of humor, insecure because people just don’t want to believe in his achievements (the reader sees right away that Henry’s device works, although imperfectly) and also because of the way he was taken advantage of as a young man (by a medium claiming to be speaking for his father without really doing so). Vincent is a bit more poetic, swaggering (but not overbearing) to hide his own insecurities which are based in his failure during a séance which led to his mentor’s death and in the fact people don’t want to believe he’s as intelligent as he is because he’s Native American. The attraction between the two is immediate (and acted on fairly quickly, if awkwardly). Their position as rivals for a big cash prize (which each needs to save their own business and keep themselves and their partners with food and shelter) is just the first road-block of many thrown in front of them by the author. But they do persevere and grow towards a happy relationship. (No unhappy endings or “murder your gays” tropes to be had in a Jordan Hawk book!) Although it’s never expressed in quite this way, what the men have in common is a loss of fathers via “possession.” Vincent was possessed by a malevolent spirit which killed his mentor/father-figure while in Vincent’s body, and Henry was “possessed” by the fraudulent medium who took advantage of Henry’s attraction and guilelessness to steal Henry’s inheritance away from him. Both of these possessions haunt the men, and affect not only their relationship with each other but with their friends. Vincent’s fear of being possessed again holds him back from holding the séances needed to keep his and Lizzie’s business open; Henry’s anger at being taken advantage of makes it difficult for him to compromise with the people he needs to make his business a success.

This may be the most diverse main cast of all of Hawk’s historicals, both in terms of ethnicity and gender, and that’s saying something. While Henry is a gay white man, Vincent is Native American, Jo is mixed-race (the child of Henry’s white uncle and a black servant), and Lizzie is transgender. Since the Spirits trilogy is primarily M/M romance, it would be easy to relegate Jo and Lizzie to the status of “secondary characters” but they really aren’t. They have their own character arcs and contribute to the successful resolution of the potentially world-shattering events they are taking part in, and they do get their own romantic sub-plots – they just don’t get any sex scenes.

And if that’s not a perfect segue, nothing is. As mentioned, it wouldn’t be a Hawk book without increasingly hot (even when they’re awkward) sex scenes between the leads. These scenes also tend to be lovingly romantic. But they are certainly not for the prudish. (I think the books read just as well without the explicit sex, but as the sex is part of what Hawk (as well as KJ Charles, Adam Carpenter, and other authors I enjoy) is known for, I can’t complain about their inclusion – and certainly can’t claim that they’re not well-written.

The trilogy tells a complete story, over the course of three interesting hauntings and along with a variety of sub-plots. I’m sure there’s much more that could be explored in this world and with these characters, but for now the author says the story is finished. (Maybe they’ll decide to revisit this world now that the long-running Whyborne & Griffin series is drawing to a close?)

MY THOUGHTS: The stories in this collection exemplify what I love about Will Ludwigsen’s writing. Two of the five give subtle fantastic/horrific twists to the world outside our own front door (to steal a phrase from Philip Jose Farmer), while two are character-driven alternate histories. The fifth story very neatly splits the difference. All five are propelled by strong voices or character points-of-view. The narrators may not always be reliable, but they are compelling.

“Perhaps” is what this book is all about. Or more properly, “what if?” ‘Perhaps’ what these characters are experiencing is supernatural, but it could all be in their minds. ‘What if’ one detail of our history was different, what would the ramifications be?

I’ve read or listened to the title story, “Acres of Perhaps,” several times now, but it was cemented as a new favorite on the very first read back in 2015. Ludgwigsen posits the existence of a 1960s horror/sf/fantasy anthology TV series that becomes a hit with fans due to the quality of the episodes but then flames out thanks to a sudden drop in quality in the second season. A fate many television shows fall victim to. But what if … what if that drop in quality was because the writer behind the most popular episodes experienced supernatural phenomena not once, but twice? Narrated in retrospect by the (in his own terms) “less talented” member of the writing staff, Barry Weyrich, we are privy not only to the rise and fall of the show and its staff, but also to the decades-long aftermath of cult fandom, tense convention appearances, and regret both professional (his role in the show’s fall) and personal (his long closeted life with his partner Tony). Each time I read it, I tease out some nuance in the characters of Barry Weyrich and David Findley that I hadn’t noticed, or hadn’t been paying attention to, before. And I still vacillate, with each reading, as to whether there’s really something supernatural going on in the story or not.

“The Leaning Lincoln” likewise teases the reader with a supernatural aspect – is the narrator’s childhood bad luck because of a possessed piece of leaden pirate treasure, or is it all just the luck of the draw – that sits behind a tale of a dysfunctional family, a sick friend, and a shattered friendship. The author’s notes at the back of the book reveal that this is one of Ludwigsen’s most personal stories, and I think it shows in the language of the narrator, who sways from conviction that the supernatural exists to conviction that it doesn’t, and back again – an ever-shortening pendulum of belief that motivates his positive and negative choices throughout the story. Other than the possibly-haunted (or maybe radioactive?) titular figurine, this story is straight out of the house down the road, and it feels both intimate and an intrusion. The real life horror exposed is far more frightening than the idea of a haunted toy.

When Ludwigsen takes on alternate history as a genre, he eschews the big socio-political events (like the outcomes of major wars or political campaigns) for more immediate (as in personal) changes that still have major impacts on the timeline.

“Night Fever” hinges on a seemingly-small thing: Charles Manson getting out of prison a decade after he did in our world, after a botched escape attempt. In some hands, this would lead to Manson having a positive effect on society, following the prevalent theory that it was the culture of the 1960s that led him to do the things he did. Ludwigsen thinks Manson would have been Manson regardless – his cult would have just developed in a different city, with different music as inspiration/justification. The story unfolds in a documentary/epistolary format: details given to the reader from various newspaper accounts, magazine profiles, tell-all memoirs, essays by Truman Capote, courtroom and interrogation room recordings. Charlie himself is quoted and described but never gets his own chance to tell his side of the story, which allows him to be exposed for what he is while still retaining an aura of mystery.

The alternate history of “Poe at Gettysburg” also hinges on a personal moment: what if the orphaned Edgar Poe had been adopted not by the Allans, but by theatre folk friends of his late parents? In this world, his rebellion against the wishes of his adoptive family leads him to law practice, which leads to his Presidency, rather than Lincoln’s, during the Civil War, and thus to a very different, but no less moving, Gettysburg Address.

“The Zodiac Walks on the Moon” could be considered a touch of alternate history, in that it’s presented in the form of a letter to the newspapers that the real Zodiac Killer never wrote. But it’s also a bit of the supernatural-tinged world outside our door, in that there’s no reason to think the real Zodiac Killer wouldn’t have been affected by the first Moon Landing. This is the shortest story in the book, relying on the audience’s familiarity with the real events mentioned at the start and on the reader’s sketching in their own mental image of the man writing this letter about how stunning human achievement can be and how it’s motivating him on his chosen path. It’s emotionally raw in a different way from “The Leaning Lincoln,” and it’s as distinctly voiced as Poe’s speech in “Poe at Gettysburg.”

In between each of the five stories are short “excerpts” from a non-existent (as of yet, anyway) episode guide to the Acres of Perhaps television show. Ludwigsen not only captures the essence of the 60s anthology shows (Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, even Alfred Hitchcock Presents), he captures perfectly the tone of books that analyze the episodes for their socio-political commentary both in and out of the context of the times. On Facebook, I petitioned Ludwigsen to please get in touch with Barry Weyrich and David Findley and any other crew of Acres of Perhaps to get their memories of the show and create a full episode guide before they pass away. Because yes, I’m convinced that there must actually have been such a show, even if the episodes themselves are no longer extant. (My favorite summary, of the episode “Dark Horse Candidate,” includes mention of a character played by an “uncharacteristically oily Leslie Nielsen”.)

In fact, any of the five stories in this collection could easily be episodes of the titular television show (although maybe “Night Fever” would need to be a tv-movie-of-the-week-length installment). If Netflix is looking for an anthology challenger to CBS’s streaming Twilight Zone, (and a creepy-horror sister series to their own more SF-based Black Mirror), this would be the ideal basis. And I mean, come on, what genre fan wouldn’t watch a show called “Acres of Perhaps”?

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): Far, far away, there is a beautiful Country which no human eye has ever seen in waking hours. Under the Sunset it lies, where the distant horizon bounds the day, and where the clouds, splendid with light and color, give a promise of the glory and beauty that encompass it. Sometimes it is given to us to see it in dreams. This Country is the Land Under the Sunset. This is the story of that Country, and what happened when evil came to abide there. It is a story all of us must hear.

MY RATING: Three stars out of Five

MY THOUGHTS: Over the past few years, I’ve been attempting to read through all of the works of Bram Stoker. It’s been a slow project. I usually put one owned-but-unread Stoker work on my TBR Challenge list each year, but there have been years where I don’t complete the Challenge and the Stoker choice for that year goes unread. I’m also pacing myself on the Stoker books I do own until I get around to buying the ones I don’t. Semi-regular re-reads of Dracula, and less frequent re-reads of The Jewel of the Seven Stars and The Lair of the White Worm, don’t help my pace either. All of this to say that I’ve been meaning to read Under the Sunset for years. I finally got around to it in May – and I’m tempted to say that’s a couple of hours of my life I’ll never get back.

Okay, it wasn’t that bad. But it’s certainly not Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories in terms of consistent quality, either.

I’d first read some of Stoker’s short stories in a tidy little volume called The Bram Stoker Bedside Companion, acquired at a library book sale somewhere in my teen years during my early fascination with Dracula and Lair of the White Worm. I liked most of the stories in that volume, many of which felt very Poe-like, and only later found out that a number of them were either novel excerpts or pulled from other collections, like this one. So I was prepared to enjoy a collection of fairy tales set in a land like our own distant past but a little bit different. A land where Evil hasn’t take root, except when it has. Or maybe it hasn’t, and all the bad things that happen are just because people are stupid and selfish? Or they’re stupid and selfish because Evil did sneak past the angelic guardians at the borders? So maybe it is all Evil’s fault after all? I’m not sure, by the end of the collection, that even Stoker knew exactly what his point was for the over-arching theme.

The title story theoretically sets the tone for the book as a whole, and the tone this one sets is stilted direct address to the reader, flowery almost purple-prose writing that is archly Victorian without any of the whimsy that makes the fairy tales of, say, Oscar Wilde so enjoyable. Not every story employs this tone, but the damage is kind of done after the first couple of pages: Stoker warning his (theoretically young and impressionable) readers that they had best pay attention and learn the lessons of the stories to follow, to think upon the fate of the Land Under the Sunset once they (knowingly or not) let Evil in to do its will. But then that thread, as I mentioned, seems to drop from most of the stories – Evil isn’t really behind most of what happens in the succeeding stories despite the overblown introduction.

My favorite story in the collection, “The Invisible Giant,” feels very Wildean: a young girl is the only one who can see an oncoming Giant, a race the humans of the Land have long since stopped believing exists, and the only one who believes her is an old hermit from outside the town. Everyone ridicules the both of them, until people start dying and the Giant turns out to be Plague. Another story of battle with a giant, “The Rose Prince,” is also enjoyable if slightly longer than it needs to be. If you can get past the awkward pre-teen romance and some very repetitive segments, it’s a good yarn about a Prince who saves the day when whole armies are incapable of the feat. And Stoker employs the “story within a story” model well in “How 7 Went Mad,” which is at once a morality play about paying attention in school and being careful what you wish for and also a surrealist farce where numbers and letters have life and talk. The ridiculousness of the final few pages of the story put me in mind of the zanier parts of The Phantom Tollbooth.

Other stories don’t work as well. The moral of “Lies and Lilies” is so blunt, and the characters so one-dimensional, that Stoker may as well have written “Don’t Lie, It Ends Badly” and saved a dozen pages or so. “The Castle of the King” is circuitous and feels unending as it slogs its way along. And I fell asleep twice trying to read “The Wondrous Child,” whom I didn’t find so much wondrous as manipulative and annoying. (It’s possible the title character is a call-back to the angelic babe who features in the title story of the collection, but I came to a point where I no longer cared if the connection existed or not simply because the characters in “Child” are so annoying.) And I’m still really not sure what to make of “The Shadow Builder,” another story that feels overwritten but also manages to include some wonderfully creepy scenes and (dare I say it, Lovecraftian?) turns of phrase.

I think ultimately my problem with this collection is that the stories feel derivative. Now I realize that a) at the time they were published they probably were not derivative even of Stoker’s peers and b) it’s impossible to be derivative of works that weren’t published until decades later (like Lovecraft and the Phantom Tollbooth). But I do think that anyone coming to this collection for the first time at this late date and after having already read Wilde, Poe, Lovecraft and Juster (not to mention the more well-known traditional fairy tales of Perrault, Grimm and Andersen) is likely to feel, as I did, that the stories in Under the Sunset feel a bit overwritten and a touch too familiar.

Anthony’s favorite punctuation mark is the semi-colon because thanks to cancer surgery in 2005, a semi-colon is all he has left. Enjoy Anthony's blog "Semi-Colon," where you will find Anthony's commentary on various literary subjects.